BLACK AND WHITE SIMPLICITY PACKS A BIG PUNCH

“I always try to be affordable. To share my work with lots of people is something magical.”

Graphic designer, visual artist, creator of Slothzine (@slothzine on Twitter), and beatmaker, Burka Bayram is from Istanbul, Turkey. His mother was a painter, and his father was a political cartoonist and illustrator. Burka became a graphic designer working on book covers, event posters, and social media whilst participating in group art exhibitions in Istanbul.

Just before the pandemic hit, he was running a small design studio. It was his partner who first came across NFTs and crypto art, commenting, “How can this be? It’s bizarre.” After much research, the friends found a collective called NFT Turkey, which helped them to onboard “against the conventional art gallery system.”

Burka works only in black and white. “My characters and shapes are simple, influenced by French cartoonists, who express all that needs to be said with simplicity. My mother was an abstract, minimalist painter, and I’ve worked to pare down unnecessary details.”

Before NFTs, Burka collected very few artworks. But from his start in the NFT space, “we tried to collect from each other,” and he now has over 3,200 artworks in his collection. Of his own work, he says, “I always try to be affordable. To share my work with lots of people is something magical.”

With the economic crisis in Istanbul, Burka and his wife decided to move to a village for “a calm life,” where you’ll find him disrupting and breaking boundaries with Procreate, his IPad Pro, a camera, two dogs, and four cats.